Last Wednesday afternoon the South Side Teen Club, part of the Fifth Street Boys and Girls club, was crowded wall to wall with Neighbourhood Heroes and their friends.

Thirty-eight people from Harewood, all of whom have been featured in this column, had their names inscribed on what the club calls "Harewood's Hidden Heroes Wall of Fame." Their stories have also been collected in a "heroes" book that will remain nearby.

Special thanks go to the Coastal Community Credit Union and the Daybreak and Nanaimo North Rotary Clubs who sponsored the wall. Thanks also to Thrifty Foods who provided deli trays for the event.

The wall has two purposes: first, to be a constant reminder to club members that they are surrounded by positive role models in their community, and second, to be a place where all students from Harewood Schools who participate in our Hidden Heroes Project (a spin-off from this column) can collect their stories and honour their "heroes" -- Students from John Barsby Community Secondary School wrote eleven of the stories about people who were honored last Wednesday.

Over the past three years, with support from the Nanaimo District Teachers' Association and a number of individual teachers, we have been developing what we call the Hidden Heroes Project in several city schools.

Part one of the project sees students identifying, interviewing and writing about role models (Hidden Heroes) in their family, neighbourhood, or school. In part two, they are encouraged, either on their own or in a group, to do something that would qualify them as Hidden Heroes and then to write about how that experience affected them and the people around them.

In the future we expect all of the stories written by students to be posted on a new student-oriented web site, which Island Internet has offered to create and host free of charge. The value of this donation has been estimated at $6,000.

Last spring I was about to give up on the Hidden Heroes Project. It just wasn't catching on as I had hoped, but then eight teachers from Georgia Avenue Community School agreed to form a Hidden Heroes Development Team to help bring the project to another level. They will develop a set of elementary school lesson plans that we will post on our new site so that teachers anywhere in the world can access them.

Recently Marty Cross, the new principal at John Barsby Community Secondary School, offered to get a group of his high school teachers involved in a similar developmental project starting in February. Gerald Fallon and some of his students from Pauline Haarer also want to help develop our web site.

Given this support, my hopes for the future of this project have grown even bigger than before.

When I return to Zimbabwe this January to continue working on a Rotary Rural School Project, I expect to get students from at least three of their schools to participate with us.

Then, over the next few years, using Rotary's connections in 168 countries around the world, my vision (not many Rotarians have heard this yet) is to see thousands of stories posted on the new web site written by students from all five continents

Can you imagine being able to go to our site and read about Neighbourhood Heroes from around the world as seen through the eyes of students who know them? Can you also imaging the impact if thousands of students here and around the world began to focus on, acknowledge, and act like the role models they admire?

I know I'm a bit of a dreamer, but man I want to see that dream come true.

To nominate a Neighbourhood Hero or to read old columns, go to www.nhero.org.